OMICRON & THE HOUSING MARKET

How will the omicron variant impact the housing market?Show more

Healthcare experts think that Omicron is so weak that they do not need to trace the Omicron variant among the people. This is good news for those who believe that the Omicron will help with herd immunity. It’s bad news for Fauci and his political operatives pushing vaccinations. Scientists at Case Western Reserve University have preliminary evidence that the risk of being admitted to the hospital or the intensive care unit during the omicron surge in the U.S. is about half of the risk observed during the delta surge. And this reflects what doctors across the country are now seeing firsthand with their patients. SO WILL HAVE TO KEEP AN EYE ON IT.

Omicron (/ˈoʊmɪkrɒn, ˈɒmɪkrɒn, oʊˈmaɪkrɒn/; uppercase Ο, lowercase ο, όμικρον) is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: Phoenician ayin.SVG. In classical Greek, omicron represented the sound [o] in contrast to omega [ɔː] and ου [oː]. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid-back rounded vowel /o̞/. Letters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O. The word literally means "little O" (o Mikron) as opposed to "great O" (ō mega).[2] In the system of Greek numerals, omicron has a value of 70.

The big-O symbol introduced by Paul Bachmann in 1894 and popularized by Edmund Landau in 1909, originally standing for "order of" ("Ordnung") and being thus a Latin letter, was apparently viewed by Donald Knuth in 1976 as a capital Omicron, probably in reference to his definition of the symbol (capital) Omega. Neither Bachmann nor Landau ever calls it "Omicron", and the word "Omicron" appears just once in Knuth's paper: in the title.

There were several systems for writing numbers in Greek; the most common form used in late classical era used omicron (either upper or lower case) to represent the value 70.

More generally, the letter omicron is used to mark the fifteenth ordinal position in any Greek-alphabet marked list. So, for example, in Euclid's Elements, when various points in a geometric diagram are marked with letters, it is effectively the same as marking them with numbers, each letter representing the number of its place in the standard alphabet.

Omicron is used to designate the fifteenth star in a constellation group, its ordinal placement an irregular function of both magnitude and position.[4][5] Such stars include Omicron Andromedae, Omicron Ceti, and Omicron Persei.

In Claudius Ptolemy's (c. 100–170) Almagest, tables of sexagesimal numbers 1 ... 59 are represented in a conventional manner[c] for Greek numbers: ′α ... ′νθ . Since the letter omicron [which represents 70 (′ο) in the standard system] is not used in sexagesimal, it is re-purposed to represent an empty number cell. In some renditions, the cell was just left blank (nothing there = value is zero), but to avoid copying errors, positively marking a zero cell with omicron was preferred, in the same way, that blank cells in modern tables are filled with a dash (—). Both an omicron and a dash imply that "this isn't a mistake, the cell is actually supposed to be empty". By coincidence, the ancient zero-value omicron (ο) resembles a modern Hindu-Arabic zero.

The World Health Organization (WHO) uses the Greek alphabet to describe variants of concern of SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus which causes COVID-19.[6] On November 26, 2021, Omicron was assigned to the B.1.1.529 variant of concern.